Planning, with orchids and wildlife on the side

North Wall drawings

We haven't been able to build for a month, because whenever the sun has shone poor TJ had to work weekends, and when he was free it was rainy.  We'll start building again this weekend, but meanwhile we've spent some time planning the north wall.

The plans we submitted to council just had a drawing of a window seat popping out, a little roof, and a few basic notes, like that we'd frame it up in 'seasoned hardwood'.*  Now we've got to figure out how to do it!

The window seat is all corners, all angles, all complicated.  The walls will be 30cm thick below the seat then 15cm thick above. There's a seat to sit on and a ledge to lean on. There are windows to frame up, a little ceiling to hang and a roof on the top. Everything has to take a lot of knocking around without moving.  I can't say we've got all the answers yet.

Corner stud framing dummy-run

We did a dummy-run of a corner framing stud with a few off-cuts, just to see in 3D what we were planning.  I plonked it down in place, and was pretty chuffed to find the pieces of reo bar that I cemented into the footings the day they were poured line up exactly with the model of the stud pieces.

All we have to do is drill a hole in the bottom of each framing piece and lower it into position, and the base of the wall will never, ever move laterally again.  Neat, eh?

While TJ's been away, I've been wandering around, checking on the plants and some of the wildlife.

The Mammal Survey Group from the Vic National Parks Association came up to check the nesting boxes on some adjacent properties (we can do ours ourselves).  We found some incredible Tuan and Sugar Glider nests, and a few inhabitants.

Sugar Gliders all snuggled up

The first orchids have started flowering - Nodding Greenhoods.

They always remind me of a protest march, or maybe that John Brack painting.  I really love them.  I kind of like their attitude - faces down, no glitz, entrap the odd gnat then back to hibernation before the devil sees them coming.

* Council wants everything framed in "seasoned hardwood".  We're not buying any old growth forest timber, so we scrounge wood from rubbish skips in Melbourne.  Some of the wood in this building has been seasoned since the 1930s!  I still need quite a few long pieces, so I take a different route to work each day and look down the back streets for renovations.  If we can find the builders we ask and they sometimes set some good wood aside, but mostly we just pull it out of skips before they get taken to the rubbish tip.  It really is criminal what we waste.